A variant of the non-nutritive habituation dishabituation sucking method was used to test 2-month-old English infants' perception of languages. This method tests for the spontaneous interest of the baby to a change in the stimulus. English and Japanese were clearly discriminated. The difference between French and Japanese was equally clearly not of interest to babies using this procedure, the babies behaving as though both languages were classified simply as 'foreign'. In order to further specify babies' representation of native and foreign language, we used Dutch, which shares a number of suprasegmental features with English. The results from our last 2 experiments indicate that a portion of our 6 -12 weekold babies consider Dutch as native, suggesting that we tapped in a transition period where the babies are still refining the suprasegmental specification of their native language.Is Dutch native English? Linguistic analysis by 2-month-olds 219

What is the relationship between the present-day hunter-gatherer studied by anthropologists and the societies of the Palaeolithic? And how is the articulation between the economy of these societies and their other aspects to be conceived? In attempting to answer these questions, this article takes into account a further problem, that of the uniqueness of Australian Aboriginal social organization. ALAIN TESTART is Directeur de Recherche, deuxieme classe, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (mailing address: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75270 Paris Cedex 6, France). Born in 1945, he was educated at the Ecole National Superieure des Mines de Paris (dipl6me d'ingenieur, i968) and at the Universite de Paris VII (doctorat de troisieme cycle en ethnologie, 1975). His research interests are th social organization of the Australian Aborigines, the social anthropology of hunter-gatherers, and symbolism. His publications include Des classifications dualistes en Australie: Essai sur l'evolution de l'organisation sociale (Paris and Lille: Editions de 1 Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Lille III, 1978), Les chasseurs-cueilleurs, ou l'origine des in6galit6s (Paris: Societe d'Ethnographie [Universite de Paris X, Nanterre], i982), Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs (Paris: EHESS, Cahiers de l'Homme, i986), and L communisme primitif, I, Economie et id6ologie (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, i985). The present paper was submitte in final form I9 VI 87.

Nancy Munn's ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’ is a landmark in our understanding of the processes by which the Aboriginal world is created and sustained. Her paper is summarised and then related to similar concerns extant among the neighbouring Aranda. Munn's account of relationships between people and country is shown to be part of a wider reality encompassing all stages of the life‐cycle and characterised by a triple dialectic between ‘surface’ and ‘depth‘, between male and female, and between life and death. The study is preliminary to a psychological account of these dialectical processes to be published at a later date.

If it is true that ‘all of social theory is a breakdown product of a decaying theology’ (Robbins on Milbank), then social theory might be said to be both discontinuous and continuous with the theology. In this article I reflect on how anthropology distances itself from religion, yet retains broadly theological concerns. Taking my cue from Christopher Herbert's observation in Culture and Anomie that anthropological ideas about culture have evident, if difficultly acknowledged, religious origins, I reflexively consider this issue in relation to my own writing and anthropological encounters I have experienced with Indigenous informants and students. I discuss two instances of my secular‐rationalist embarrassment in the presence of divine revelation and relate these to my anthropological modelling of Aboriginal religion, suggesting reasons for the problematic disjunction between my ability to analyse this religion and my inability to properly experience it (or something like it). I also make a case for the legitimacy of Durkheim's search for ‘the elementary forms of the religious life’ in order to clarify what is essential (‘sacred’) about all morality, rejecting Milbank's characterisation of it as ‘perverse theology’. There is, I suggest, nothing intrinsically ‘perverse’ about this search, so long as we follow Robbins' suggestion and relativise the Christian mythos in order to look to a more broadly‐based anthropological conception of what it means to live gracefully in the presence of some ‘holy spirit’.

In an earlier paper published in this journal Nancy Munn's ‘The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara Myth’ was discussed and related to Aranda mythology. This paper commences where the earlier one finished and offers a psychological account of ‘the transformation of subjects into objects’. In particular, it discusses, within a psychoanalytic framework, the relationship between communication, the body and the environment inherent in Aranda myth and rite, suggesting that what Munn calls ‘the a priori grounds’ of the Aboriginal moral order can be understood as a set of dialectical shifts occurring within the life‐cycle. These shifts involve the realisation and reconciliation of a number of oppositions, including male and female; earth and sky, death and life; conscious and unconscious; and, in particular, language and speech.